Professor Francesco C. Billari, Head of Department and Professor of Sociology and Demography, University of Oxford:

It’s an ideological error to put children against immigrants

Redistributing work from a life course and family perspective will let women to return actively on the labour market

Photo: Maria Koleva

Maria Koleva

15 December, 2012

Maria Koleva

Extreme­ly low fer­til­i­ty in cur­rent soci­e­ties is a sign that a desire to live a good life, is becom­ing increas­ing­ly incom­pat­i­ble with the desire of hav­ing chil­dren

We can­not build good Euro­pe­an soci­e­ties with­out invest­ing in pol­i­cies that allow us to work and real­ise our expec­ta­tions

The EU is lag­ging behind because there is no dis­tinc­tion in social expend­i­ture between invest­ment and cur­rent expens­es

Close-up: Fran­ces­co C. Bil­lari is Head of Depart­ment and Pro­fes­sor of Soci­ol­o­gy and Demog­ra­phy at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Oxford. Pre­vi­ous­ly he worked at Boc­co­ni Uni­ver­si­ty, Milan, where he was also Vice-Rec­tor of Devel­op­ment and as Direct­or of the Don­de­na Cen­tre. He is Pres­i­dent of the Euro­pe­an Asso­ci­a­tion for Pop­u­la­tion Stud­ies and in 2012 was grant­ed the Clogg Award from the Pop­u­la­tion Asso­ci­a­tion of Amer­i­ca. He was among the emi­nent research­ers that took part at Pop­u­la­tion Europe Net­work forum on active aging and redis­tri­bu­tion of work in Europe, held recent­ly in Brus­sels.

- Prof. Bil­lari, is the low birth rate a big threat for Europe in dem­o­graph­ic aspect?

- Extreme­ly low fer­til­i­ty in cur­rent soci­e­ties is a sign that a desire to live a good life, which has to be respect­ed by all of us, wom­en and men alike is becom­ing increas­ing­ly incom­pat­i­ble with the desire of hav­ing chil­dren. All the opin­ion sur­veys indi­cate that men and wom­en still want to have kids. How­e­ver, they will want to have kids as long as this is com­pat­i­ble with a good life, a work, a good career and a good prospect for their chil­dren. So the threat of low fer­til­i­ty is sig­nal­ling us that our soci­e­ties have a prob­lem in terms of man­a­ging to have a good life while main­tain­ing the stand­ard ideas of real­is­ing fam­i­ly goals. It's not nec­es­sa­ri­ly a threat in terms of declin­ing pop­u­la­tion because in soci­e­ties with low fer­til­i­ty and high qual­i­ty of life immi­grants are com­ing and increas­ing the pop­u­la­tion num­ber. How­e­ver, soci­e­ties with low qual­i­ty of life and low fer­til­i­ty and I'm think­ing for some east­ern Euro­pe­an soci­e­ties as Bul­gar­ia, for instance, bas­i­cal­ly have a dou­ble bur­den of low fer­til­i­ty and sev­er­al peo­ple migrat­ing out of the coun­try, espe­cial­ly the qual­i­fied ones. In that sense low fer­til­i­ty is a prob­lem because it is a symp­tom of a pro­found prob­lem in adapt­ing soci­e­ties to the goals of indi­vid­u­als. Suc­cess­ful soci­e­ties now, we have some in Europe, com­bine the desire to have a fam­i­ly with the desire to be a suc­cess­ful indi­vid­u­al in the job mar­ket, to have a suc­cess­ful career.

- How the redis­tri­bu­tion of work from a life course per­spec­tive could be pro­duc­tive?

- Let me start from the idea that now in Europe, bas­i­cal­ly in all Euro­pe­an soci­e­ties men and wom­en are equal at least in the first part of their life. They study the same num­ber of years, they increas­ing­ly study sim­i­lar sub­jects. That's a very impor­tant point of depar­ture because if we want to under­stand how to make a pro­duc­tive life out of Euro­pe­ans we have to start from this idea. Men and wom­en not only are born, let's say the­o­ret­i­cal­ly equal, but they are increas­ing­ly more equal in terms of what we call human cap­i­tal, their edu­ca­tion­al invest­ment. So if we start from that we have to try and think how the life of men and wom­en devel­ops aft­er this peri­od of edu­ca­tion and there come the prob­lems. Because in soci­e­ties in which hav­ing a fam­i­ly and work­ing is not com­pat­i­ble, bas­i­cal­ly the life of men and wom­en becomes much dif­fer­en­ti­at­ed and that's not good use of the edu­ca­tion, espe­cial­ly the edu­ca­tion that wom­en went through. Redis­trib­ut­ing work from a life course per­spec­tive, I will add and fam­i­ly per­spec­tive, will mean tak­ing advan­tage of the fact that we have wom­en as edu­cat­ed as men, if not more edu­cat­ed than men and let­ting them be able to con­trib­ute to the work­ing life poten­tial­ly on equal grounds with respect to men. The cost of keep­ing wom­en not work­ing is enor­mous and is also a chal­lenge to the pen­sion sys­tem because we are not using all the poten­tial work­ers to con­trib­ute to pen­sions. Because of pop­u­la­tion aging we need all the resour­ces to sus­tain pen­sion sys­tems.

- What are the main advan­ta­ges of com­bin­ing work desires and fam­i­ly desires?

- The advan­tage is that we invest in chil­dren in dif­fer­ent ways. First of all, respon­si­ble adults want to have chil­dren but they don't see chil­dren as a poten­tial bur­den for their job desires and also invest per­son­al­ly in hav­ing qual­i­ty chil­dren. I'm not speak­ing of a large num­ber of chil­dren but let's say poten­tial­ly two why not three chil­dren. We are not speak­ing about large fam­i­lies as in the past. On the oth­er hand, cre­at­ing the infra­struc­ture that allows to com­bine work and fam­i­ly espe­cial­ly child care has a dou­ble advan­tage - the advan­tage on chil­dren is that usu­al­ly when they get child­care they get high qual­i­ty edu­ca­tion. So chil­dren have to start ear­ly to go to the child­care. Uni­ver­sal child­care pro­vi­sion is one of the direc­tions. You invest in chil­dren through child­care and you invest in fam­i­lies by allow­ing wom­en to com­bine work and fam­i­ly. It's a dou­ble invest­ment and this is a dif­fer­ent kind of expend­i­ture as for instance expend­i­ture on pen­sions. You real­ly spend on some­thing that will give returns in the future. It will give returns because if wom­en stay on the labour mark­er there will be tax­es for instance. It will be returns because you invest in chil­dren, they will be the cit­i­zens of tomor­row.

- Does Europe need to invest in immi­grants along with invest­ing in chil­dren?

- I'll say we prob­a­bly should do both. We have no choice. Bas­i­cal­ly Europe will have to par­tic­i­pate in a com­pe­ti­tion to attract the most edu­cat­ed and the most prom­is­ing immi­grants all over the world and these goals are not com­pet­ing. It's an ide­o­log­i­cal error to put chil­dren against immi­grants. Build­ing a good soci­e­ty is what we have to aspire - a soci­e­ty where fam­i­lies, wom­en and men want to have chil­dren. It will also be a soci­e­ty where peo­ple will want to migrate to, where it will be attract­ive. If we build a good soci­e­ty we'll poten­tial­ly be able to choose who is arriv­ing as an immi­grant and not just to wait and see who is able to come. There is also one rea­son why it is una­void­a­ble to think that immi­gra­tion is nec­es­sa­ry. For many coun­tries fer­til­i­ty has been low for dec­ades and even if we change our soci­e­ties and we go back with high­er fer­til­i­ty there will be dec­ades of low­er births. The only way to com­pen­sate these miss­ing births is immi­grants and there is plen­ty of young peo­ple in the world now­a­days. In Ita­ly this has already hap­pened, bas­i­cal­ly in Ita­ly and Spain migrants have replaced the miss­ing births. There is a lot of poten­tial calls for immi­gra­tion in East­ern Europe espe­cial­ly for the coun­tries that are doing bet­ter and we've already seen that in the Czech Repub­lic, in Poland. If we do not see this in Bul­gar­ia and Roma­nia it's not a dem­o­graph­ic prob­lem, unfor­tu­nate­ly it's a prob­lem of how the soci­e­ty and econ­o­my are doing well. Of course in these coun­tries there is always a poten­tial that some of the peo­ple that are work­ing abroad may come back with kind of increased human cap­i­tal and a good amount of mon­ey. So that could be for instance one of the hopes for these coun­tries. This worked for some of the south­ern Euro­pe­an coun­tries in the past as Spain and Ita­ly. But usu­al­ly when peo­ple migrate they don't come back so often.

- Why is this par­a­dox - at the time when youth unem­ploy­ment is at its highest in Europe, there is a debate how eld­er­ly peo­ple to work longer?

- Eco­nom­ics shows that bas­i­cal­ly there is not always this com­pe­ti­tion between young and old work­ers. Some­times it was in the pub­lic sec­tor. Usu­al­ly in the econ­o­my at large the num­ber of work­ers is not pre-fixed so it is a fact that eld­er­ly stay­ing in the labour mar­ket may poten­tial­ly also cre­ate jobs for the young­er peo­ple. One of the good exam­ples are jobs in the serv­ice sec­tors that allow com­bin­ing work and fam­i­ly and work and care, it's espe­cial­ly good for the child­care but may be also good for the eld­er­ly. The same prob­lem is for peo­ple who are in mid­dle life 40-45 and they have prob­lems on the labour mar­ket because they are not too young and they can­not retire. There must work bas­i­cal­ly the same flex­i­cu­ri­ty pol­i­cies that can be applied to moth­ers. The mar­ket should be healthy and flex­i­ble but allow for chan­ges. We can­not go back to a sit­u­a­tion that peo­ple are secure for the same job for ever but we can cre­ate soci­e­ties in which it is pos­si­ble to have a sec­ond chance and third chance. And the same pol­i­cies that work for moth­ers who go back to the mar­ket should work for men at age of 45. I think the gen­er­al approach should be mak­ing age and fam­i­ly choi­ces less rel­e­vant in tak­ing job deci­sions. One of the ideas of redis­tri­bu­tion is that we should be ready to re-think a lit­tle bit on the num­ber of hours worked so some peo­ple could not just go from full time job to retire­ment. It will be good idea to have a phas­ing out stage where peo­ple don't work full time for a while and this could be the best way to exploit and take advan­tage of expe­ri­enced eld­er­ly.

- What pol­i­cies at Euro­pe­an and nation­al lev­els do you think can con­trib­ute to over­com­ing the dem­o­graph­ic cri­sis?

- Again the major threat to pos­i­tive dem­o­graph­ic devel­op­ment for the moment is the great finan­cial cri­sis because some of the pol­i­cies that could be help­ful will be intro­duc­ing uni­ver­sal child­care, spend­ing more on immi­grants' inte­gra­tion, try­ing to devise pol­i­cies that help moth­ers enter­ing the labour mar­ket. Some of these pol­i­cies are expen­sive. So one of the chal­len­ges here is to say these pol­i­cies are invest­ment pol­i­cies. Spend­ing part of the GDP on these pol­i­cies is not like spend­ing part of the GDP on some­thing that is just con­sumed in a year, it's an invest­ment. The EU is lag­ging behind because there is no dis­tinc­tion in social expend­i­ture between invest­ment and cur­rent expens­es. In that sense Euro­pe­an gov­ern­ments haven't done enough. So the key issue is to think also about a Euro­pe­an budg­et where some of the social expend­i­ture is seen as invest­ment expend­i­ture. It's like build­ing bridg­es, build­ing roads and infra­struc­ture. Spend­ing mon­ey on child­care is bas­i­cal­ly equal to infra­struc­ture spend­ing. We have to face this in the cur­rent cri­sis and the best way is to build this kind of social infra­struc­ture for the future.